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COLUMBUS DAY. 

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BY 


CHARLES HERVEY TOWNSHEND. 

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Reprinted from the N.-E. Historical and Genealogical Register for April, 1893 . 


BOSTON : 

DAVID CLAPP & SON, PRINTERS, 
1 15 High Street, 

1893. 








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COLUMBUS DAY. 


The following paper is a portion of an article which was prepared by 
the author, apropos of the approach of Columbus day, and was published 
in the New Haven Journal and Courier, of Jan. 29th, 1891, relative to 
Columbus and how this country came to be named America instead of 
receiving a name in honor of the great discovereV. 

Brief mention will be made regarding the original or native name of our 
continent which it bore before the Columbian discovery, and point out how, 
by a combination of circumstances, the whole world has been led into the 
error that America was named for Vesputius, a Florentine map-maker, who 
enlightened Europe on the discoveries of Columbus. 

Am-ar-ca is the native name of the land which Christopher Columbus 
discovered in 1498 near the mouth of the Orinoco river on the north coast 
of the South American continent, while making his third voyage westward 
from Spain in quest of a more direct route to India, Cathay and Japan. 
These last named countries having been visited in the thirteenth century 
by the noble and illustrious Venetian voyager, Marco Polo, of which he, 
on his return to his native city, published to the then known world so in- 
teresting an account, and concerning which Colonel Yule of the Royal 
Bengal (British) army has also enlightened us in his ( Polo’s) letters of his 
eastern travels. The vast extent of those countries, their immense popula- 
tion, mineral and agricultural productions, and the unsurpassed magnifi- 
cence of the Tartar dynasty and of the Great Khans who at that period 
held autocratic sway of Asia. 

The Baron de Humboldt tells us that the first settlement of Spaniards 
on the main land was at a place called Amaraca-panna, and on a map 
showing the discoveries and explorations of Columbus on the coast of 
Venezuela from the Dragon’s Mouth (one of the approaches to the Bay of 
Para) between the island of Trinidad and the coast of South America and 
the mouth of the Orinoco river appears the name Maraca-panna, or properly 
Amaraca-panna. This name Amarca was adopted by the Spaniards for the 
new country, and so laid down on their charts and publications of that date, 
and so gave publicity concerning this native name and by which later the 
whole western continent became known to Europeans by the national 
name of its chief nation. 

The name Amarca is in this form : viz., Am-ar-ca. The root-ar is in three 
forms : ar, primary ; er, secondary ; and or, a tertiary state ; so that the 
name Am-ar-ca and America are identical. 

The sacred book of the Peruvians shows that Amarca or America was 
really the national name of their country. This has been proved by tra- 
velers and chart makers, who show that early South Americans adopted the 
system of adding prefixes to the national name in designating the most im- 


4 


portant cities, such as Cundin-Aniarca, Cay-Amarca, Pult-Araarca, Yan- 
Amarca, Ang-Amarca and Vin-Araarca, and their capital was called Amarca ; 
and to give here in way of an illustration a parallel we will say North 
Haven, blast Haven, West Haven, etc., etc. 

From this time, A. D. 1500, the name of Amarca was well known in 
Europe, and every year new expeditions for exploration and trade were 
fitted out, as history abundantly proves, viz., those of Nino and Pinzon, 
both companions of Columbus; Lepe 1501, Guerea 1502, etc., etc. The 
capital of the new country, Amarca, was burned by the Spaniard Alvardo 
in 1524. 

Having shown the name America to have been of native origin, it natu- 
rally follows that an explanation should be sought as to why the great error 
which it has taken centuries to explain was made by early historians and 
thrown broadcast to the world; why the nickname Amerigo for Alberticus 
Vesputius, a Florentine naval astronomer, should have been thus misapplied. 
Vespucci was not even a mariner. He was a man of business who, in 
May, 1499, and the year following the Columbian discovery of the Ameri- 
can continent, accompanied’ the Ojeda expedition as a passenger with the 
object in view to collect materials for his new books and charts, which later 
found a market and sale in the countries of Europe, and as there were 
several Vespucci at this date following the same calling, he was distinguished 
from the others (who were his relations) on account of this voyage by the 
cognomen of the new country of which he wrote, and was thus known to 
the world by its native name, Amarca. 

It was the custom at that period to give men who had accomplished re- 
markable deeds an additional cognomen, as in our day General Gordon, 
who served in China, was named Chinese Gordon; General Jackson, Stone- 
wall Jackson ; Dr. Livingston, African Livingston, etc., etc. ; so, as Alber- 
ticus Vesputius had voyaged to the new found land of Columbus, whose dis- 
covery of it no one disputed at that period and of which Columbus had 
made charts, Vespucci was given, we are led to suppose from investiga- 
tion, the cognomen of “Amerigo ” Vespucci. Early in the sixteenth cen- 
tury (A. D. 1500) the duke of Lorraine gave to the famous monastery of 
St. Dee, where the learned monk, Waltze Muller, was the principal, a 
printing press; and the publications of Vespucci regarding the discovery of 
the new country being at that time new, these monks, wishing to show the 
wonders of printing, issued on April 2G, 1507, as their first work, a little 
book (four pages) and with it the Vespucci map of the then supposed world, 
with the new country added thereto. 

Lambert says in tracing the new-found-land they (the monks) were 
guided by the published letters of Vesputius, and in the preface of the work 
it was suggested that the western continent be named Amerigo, after the 
man who, they added, had discovered it. They did not know that Ves- 
putius himself had taken the name Amerigo (Italian) from Amarca, the 
native name of the country which he had visited and of which he had 
written. 

About A. D. 1512, Muller, finding out his error, issued a new map of 
the new discoveries, and without mentioning his error wrote on it, “ This 
land with the adjacent isles was found by Columbus, an officer in command 
for the king of Castile.” Hereafter all the new maps seem to have copied 
this native name of the new country, Amerigo, but spelling it America, and 
the name was generally adopted by the whole world, and no one seems to 
have corrected the wrong impression that had gone out broadcast through 
the medium of this, at the time, seemingly insignificant fact. 


5 


I will not repeat the voyages of the Northmen to Vineland (New England) 
centuries before Columbus’s voyages, 1492-1502, when he explored the 
north and west shores of the Carribean sea, and unknown to himself 
discovered a continent, supposing it, on account of error regarding the then 
unknown circumference of the world, to be contiguous to Cathay on the 
eastern shores of Asia Minor. Nor will I enlarge at length on the history 
of the voyage of Columbus and his contemporaries, with which all are 
familiar, but will only make brief mention of those navigators and their 
exploits, as their names are required to fill up and connect history, and as 
they were known factors in stimulating the nations of western Europe to 
combined efforts in promoting the development and settlement of a newly 
discovered continent. 

It has been abundantly proved by Columbus’s own letters that he had, 
from some source, knowledge of lands west of the line of Ptolemy. The 
Punctum Meridenale of the nations of the east was drawn through the 
most western of the Canary Islands. Some sailors and geographers, how- 
ever, used the meridian of the peak of Teneriffe. The Arabians used the 
most western cape of Europe known to them on the Atlantic ocean, and 
that was probably the oriental meridian adopted by Ptolemy, who flour- 
ished one hundred and fifty years before Christ, and who reduced geography 
to a regular science. During the dark ages, which followed the fall of 
Rome, the arts and sciences were kept by the Arabians and eastern nations 
of Europe after the return of Polo and Manderville. 

The voyage of Columbus to Iceland and Greenland, of which I will give 
an abstract from his letter, is supported by the account of a dying shipwrecked 
Spanish pilot named Buxola, who had been driven by storms into the 
western sea in sight of unknown lands, arriving ill at the newly discovered 
isle of Madara, where then dwelt Columbus, giving in return for his hospi- 
tality the secret of the voyage which strengthened the faith in the belief 
that it might be reached by sailing west through the trade winds from 
Spain. Columbus, in this letter on his voyage to Iceland, written fifteen 
years before his discovery of America, an abstract of which his son gives, 
says: “In the year 1477, in February, I navigated 100 leagues beyond 
Thule, the southern part of which is 73 degrees distant beyond the equator, 
and not 63 degrees as some pretend, neither situated within the line which in- 
cludes the west of Ptolemy, but is much more westerly.” Seneca (61 B.C.) 
being transported with a rapture, with a poetical fury and divination, sung 
something of it in his Media: 

In after age the time shall come 
In which the all-devouring foam 
Shall lose its proper bound and shew 
Another continent of view ; 

Nor frozen Thule shall we see, 

Tlie utmost parts of the earth to be. 

But it is folly to think that any one knew of the unknown continent in 
the time of Seneca. Historians tell us that Thule was the name generally 
given by the ancients to the most northerly part of Europe known to them, 
and, according to Pliny, an island in the northern seas. But most modern 
geographers identify Tliule with Iceland. 

The learned now believe that Columbus actually visited Greenland and 
that he was unaware that it was a part of a new world, which he afterward 
discovered with so much courage and good fortune; and as we have positive 
evidence from Columbus’s own pen of his having voyaged there, it is fair 
to presume that at Iceland he first conceived the scheme of not following 


6 


the circuitous track of the north.erners via Iceland and Greenland to the 
southwest, but of sailing directly westward from Spain to Cathay (Japan 
and China) of Marco Polo, who flourished centuries before — A. D. 1250 
-1324. 

Columbus’s successful voyage, 1492, was followed by the Cabots, father 
and son, 1497-1498, in the employ of Henry VII. of England, John Ver- 
razzanio, a French corsair, in the employ of Francis I., king of France, 
1524, when he coasted from Wilmington, North Carolina, to Nova Scotia, 
and took possession of the coast, as James Cartier later in 1534 did in the 
French king’s name. 

Varrazzano in 1524 anchored his ship on the bays of Norembaga and 
explored the eastern part of Long Island Sound, and gives us, in his report 
to the French King, the first description of the island at the east entrance, 
and the noble harbor of New London, Narragausett Bay and Sandy Hook. 

Notes. — Henry Stevens, of Vermont, tells us that on the third of November, 
1507, there was published in Italian at Vicenza, a most important collection of 
voyages under the title “ Countries Newly Discovered and the New World of 
Alberticus Vespucci,” containing accounts of the voyage of Cadamas to Cape 
Verde 1454-5, De-Centra to Senegal 1462, Vasco de Gama 1497-1500, Cabral 
1500-1, Coluinbns (three voyages) 1492-1498, of Vespucci, four voyages of 
Cortcreal and others. This book was the next year, 1508, printed in Latin and 
German. Lambert writes : “ I cannot account for the fact that his name appears 
so often in history as Alberticus. He (Vespucci) seems to have adoped the 
name Amerigo and knew of the treasures of Condin Amarca, afterwards called 
the Golden City, or Eldorado, by the Spaniards, which the crown had resolved 
to spend millions to find. He kept the secret, and Spain appointed him piloto 
mayor de la casa de construction — a sort of first lord of the admiralty. In this 
position it was his duty to make maps and to write the native name on that part 
representing the western hemisphere.” 

Those that did not know his name was Alberticus and who only heard of him 
as Amerigo-Vespucci, who had travelled to the new-found-land which had been 
named Amerigo, must have naturally arrived at the conclusion that the country 
had received his name. 

Juan Elorens, or Giovanni, a French corsair, and a Florentine under oi’ders of 
Francis I., 1524, was sent out to seek a passage to Cathay, made the coast of 
North America, which obstructed his passage westward, and which he examined 
and charted and named Francesca. 

In his report to the French king, on his return in 1525, just after the battle of 
Favia, which was lost and Francis a prisoner in Spain, and not released until 
1526, he gave an account of his discoveries, naming more than lift}" harbors and 
headlands after places in Normand}', and an account of the. natives he saw at 
the entrance of New York harbor, eastern entrance of Long Island Sound and 
Narragausett Bay, having cast anchor in these places during the summer of 1524. 

His discovery embraced a coast line from about Deippe in 27 degrees north 
latitude, shown on a map made by his brother (“ son frere et hertier”) to the 
R. de la buelta in 43 north latitude. 

Harrisses gives us the following tr.an.slation from Ramusio, vol. iii., fos. 423- 
426, with a map bearing the inscription La Noovo Francia. The discourse is not 
dated ; but Ramusio in his introduction says that it w’as written in the year 1539. 
— “ This Coast teas discovered 15 years ago by Giovanni da Varrazzano icho took 
possession of the same in the name of King Francis and of My Lady the Regent. 
That Country is called French Land by many even by the Portugues themselves.” 

“ The Regent Avas Louise de Savoie, the mother of Francis I., and this seems 
to account for the inscription both on the Maggiolo and Varrazano Maps.” 

Luisa, named for the French king’s mother, is an island off the south coast 
of NeAV England, and Adrian Block, in 1614, laid it down on his chai't, and it is 
now known as Block Island. 



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